Researchers: Abortion should be listed as a ‘major cause of death’ in statistics

Researchers from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte are challenging the scientific community’s refusal to acknowledge abortion as a cause of death, despite the settled science that the embryos and fetuses eliminated by abortion are living human beings.

“The exclusion of a major cause of death from the vital statistics system, especially one with large racial and ethnic disparities, should be a major concern to the scientific community and society as a whole,” write James Studnicki, Sharon J. MacKinnon, and John W. Fisher, especially since “there is no credible scientific opposition to the fact that a genetically distinct human life begins at conception and that an induced abortion is a death.”

The authors of the new study argue that rectifying the situation is necessary to “assess [abortion’s] magnitude against other major causes of death” and its “contribution to years of potential life lost,” and to “compare its relative impact on these outcomes for the three major racial and ethnic groups in the United States: Hispanics and non-Hispanic Blacks (NHB) and Whites (NHW).”

They found that when added back into death statistics, abortion accounted for just 16.4% of white deaths, but 61.1% of black deaths and 64% of Hispanic deaths— more than three and four times, respectively— the latter ethnic groups’ combined death tolls “from all diseases of the heart and malignant neoplasms.”

They further found that “for Hispanic[s] and blacks, abortion deaths were 79.3 and 57.5 times the number of homicide deaths, respectively.”

The authors also criticized the scientific community for failing to show a willingness to correct this problem. Studnicki told Breitbart News that “the overwhelming proportion of academics and public health professionals support access to legal induced abortion.” He cited an anecdote:

The best illustration I can give you of this point of view comes from an editor of a journal who declined to use our paper. He said… “in the tradition of (Journal Name withheld) the reviewers were all staunch advocates of ‘choice’ and were unhappy with your point of view.” This is a chilling victory of ideology over science.

As Live Action News has covered, it is a scientific fact–not religious belief or philosophical speculation–that a living human being, biologically distinct from his or her mother, exists upon fertilization. From their earliest stages of existence, embryos objectively meet the criteria by which modern biology defines life, organisms, and membership in the human species. Dozens of mainstream medical texts and medical authorities unambiguously affirm the life and humanity of the preborn.

Even many abortionists have admitted it, such as Oregon abortion facility owner Aileen Klass’s declaration: “Of course human life begins at conception” and William Harrison’s acknowledgment, “No one, neither the patient receiving an abortion, nor the person doing the abortion, is ever, at anytime, unaware that they are ending a life.”

In fact, the past four decades of American abortion law are based on the Supreme Court’s faulty claims in Roe v. Wade that there was no answer to “the difficult question of when life begins” and that “those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus.” The Roe majority admitted that if that question was resolved, the legal “right” to abortion would “of course” collapse, as preborn babies would be specifically protected by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.

Given the incontrovertible scientific facts and their deep ramifications for public policy, political expediency–not commitment for truth or the scientific method–is the only rationale for pretending death by abortion does not count as death for the purposes of death statistics.